Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about how a certain filmgoer should get over his hesitance about watching John Wick: Chapter Four — not to mention One through Three — which Schulz sums up as “Buster Keaton, but with a lot of bullets”: “You could put [the plots and dialogue from all four movies, running approx seven hours] on a cocktail napkin.” In the Wick world, everyone is an assassin — and once you’ve accepted that premise, then everything else falls neatly into place; and that’s the appeal of the series in a nutshell. They also discuss The Lost King, about the incredible, real-life story concerning Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), a commoner whose ME is not a title, but whose discovery of Richard III’s lost burial site changes all that, earning her (curiously enough) an MBE. Schulz thought the story, written by Steven Coogan and Jeff Pope, was entertaining, though the appearance of Harry Lloyd, who first portrays Richard III in a theatre production, popping up as a Richard apparition whom only Langley can see/hear, proves distracting as hell. (Note: In 1951, Josephine Tey wrote the novel The Daughter of Time, in which a convalescent Scotland Yard Inspector works out from his hospital bed the fact that the popular depiction of Richard III as a monstrous hunchback who murdered two young princes is a fiction — worse still, an example of era propaganda ossifying into fact. Nonetheless, Richard’s villainous image persists, owing primarily to Shakespeare’s portrayal of him. So we should all lay off the guy at long last; he’s suffered enough obloquy.) In other news, the boys are excited by the forthcoming Dungeons and Dragons: Honor among Thieves, despite the handful of predecessor films based on the role-playing game having all been terrible, and Schulz’s attempts at reading the source novels causing his eyes to water. It looks like the producers are playing this one for slapstick — not the worst thing that could happen to the material. Another is Spinning Gold, about Timothy Scott Bogart, the founder of Casablanca Records, which sounds — promising?. . .

“John Wick: Chapter 4” and “The Lost King”